Overcharges hide in the make-ready bill, and no builder has time to catch them pole by pole. We do. We read every estimate and invoice against your agreement and the rules that govern each charge, flag what you were overbilled, and hand you a packet ready to dispute. On contingency. Find nothing, pay nothing.
The pole owner estimates the work, does the work, bills for it, and grades its own math. No one on your side has time to read every line against your agreement and the rules that govern the pole. So the overcharges sit there, a replacement pole you didn't need, a fee that belongs on someone else's bill, quietly padding what you pay.
Upload it with your signed agreement through the intake form. Review before you pay, or audit after you're billed. No portal to log into first. One document is enough to start, and you do not need to send the whole project's paperwork. That is the whole ask.
Every line item is checked against your agreement, the rules that actually govern that pole, federal or state, and the regional benchmark. Same checks, same order, every document. What we check, and what we will not.
A plain-language summary and, where applicable, a Findings Report with citations and the corrected amount, addressed to you. Every citation points to the clause, rule, or benchmark it rests on, so you can check the work before you send anything. If nothing is wrong, the finding says so, and there is nothing to pay.
Read the full methodology and accuracy page →
Every invoice runs through four independent checks. Each catches a different category of error, and they compound: a charge can pass one and still fail another.
Line items are compared against the rates, cost-share terms, and scope in your signed attachment agreement.
Subpart J where it applies. But Section 224 does not reach most cooperative or municipal poles, so charges are checked against whichever regime does.
Every audit adds observations by pole owner and region, and every later audit is measured against a sharper set. It compounds in one direction only.
Invoices are checked against prior estimates and invoices for the same pole to catch duplicate billing and quiet cost creep.
You see your own invoices.
We are building the map.
One builder can't tell whether a charge is fair on its own. So we are building what makes that answerable: the rule for every owner class in every state, researched from primary sources, and what comparable work actually bills at, by pole owner and region. Every audit adds to it, and it compounds for you, not for the pole owner. Early builders shape it for their own region first.
The rules that divide a joint-use pole are not the rules that price it. The power company's conductors sit at the top. Below them is a band of forty inches that exists so a communications worker can climb past energized wire and live, and nothing may be attached inside it. Your fiber goes below that, alongside whoever got there first.
Every make-ready charge is a claim about one of those spaces: that there was no room left in yours, that making room meant moving plant belonging to someone else, or that the pole itself had to come out. The invoice is rarely specific about which, and the three carry different cost rules.
Supply conductors and the neutral sit above everything else. Raising them is one of the ways room gets made below, and that reaches your invoice.
NESC Rules 235C4 and 238E keep a climber clear of energized wire. It is not spare capacity, and it is why a pole with visible room on it has none.
One foot is presumed yours. 47 CFR 1.1410. An incumbent bears no part of the cost of moving its own plant where you are the sole reason it moved. 1.1408(b).
Your share of unusable space is two thirds of an equal split among all attachers. 47 CFR 1.1409. That count is a presumption too, and it can be challenged.
Where the FCC's Subpart J rules reach the pole, the utility owes you a detailed, itemized estimate on a pole-by-pole basis if you ask for one, with documentation sufficient to determine the basis of every charge in it, and a detailed, itemized final invoice whenever the final cost differs from that estimate. Those are duties. What almost nobody does is test whether the itemization in front of them actually satisfies them.
And Subpart J does not reach every pole. It does not cover cooperative, municipal, railroad or government owned poles, and twenty three states plus the District of Columbia have certified that they regulate attachments themselves, which puts the federal rules aside for the poles they cover. On a pole outside Subpart J there is frequently no itemization duty at all.
Either way, itemization is a formatting duty. It tells you what the utility says it did. It does not tell you whether the charge belongs to you, and allocation is where the money is. That is the line this check is run on.
47 CFR 1.1411(e) and 1.1411(e)(3). The estimate and final invoice duties were codified at 1.1411(d) before the renumbering adopted in 2025; FCC 26-6, Comcast v. Appalachian Power, cites the current 1.1411(e)(3).
Section 224 entitles you to the incremental cost of clearing space, not a new pole. The line does not say which one it is.
Sixteen percent of this invoice, with no hours, no rate and no units. The document has no field where the working would go.
Where Subpart J applies, a final cost that differs from the estimate has to arrive as a detailed, itemized invoice with the basis of every charge. Nobody is checking whether this one did.
A stronger pole is an asset on their books after you are gone. The invoice does not raise who pays for it.
NCTA has told the FCC, citing data supplied by the electric utilities themselves, that actual costs exceed estimated costs 50 to 90 percent of the time. An advocacy filing in WC Docket No. 17-84, not an FCC finding, and worth reading as such. It still describes what every builder already knows.
Published modeling puts roughly 96 percent of touched poles at routine rearrangement cost. The 4 percent that get replaced carry about 45 percent of the total spend, and more than 60 percent at the high end. Your whole outcome turns on a few expensive decisions.
In February 2026 the FCC ruled for Comcast against Appalachian Power, applying a rule already on the books: you owe the incremental cost of making room, not a new pole. Months after the order the utility was still billing full replacement. The rule was never the problem.
A BEAD or RDOF award is a fixed number. Make-ready overruns do not come out of margin, they come out of homes served. In 2024 one national operator returned RDOF awards across three states citing costs primarily associated with extensive utility pole replacements.
You cannot staff your way out of this either. An outside plant engineer runs around $127,000 in base salary and mid-market builders are bidding against national carriers for them. Meanwhile the utility's own make-ready engineering is frequently outsourced to a firm billing per application. Both sides of the invoice are already automated. Only one side was being checked.
An estimate you control, based on the applicable FCC cost-allocation rules, not a claim about any client's results. Set your own numbers.
Illustrative, not a quote. Your real number depends on your invoices and your region. You pay only on savings the pole owner actually concedes: 20% on the first $25,000, then 15%, 12% and 10% on the amounts above. On project monitoring the share is half of this.
See if a single estimate or invoice has errors before you commit to anything.
Nothing to sign and no card. One document, one finding, sent to your inbox, and you decide what to do next. No obligation to move to a paid audit afterward.
Run a free checkOne document or one batch. Nothing upfront, and nothing at all unless the pole owner actually adjusts the charge.
20% on the first $25,000 of Actual Savings, then 15%, 12% and 10% on the amounts above, the way tax brackets work. We are paid only on savings the pole owner actually concedes, never on a charge that merely looks wrong.
Audit my buildPriced per build project, not per company, so it sits with the project it belongs to. Every estimate checked before you pay and every invoice after.
Roughly one to three percent of the make-ready budget it watches. One pole billed at full replacement instead of incremental cost can cover most of a year.
See monitoring plans →Using published third-party modeling rather than our own numbers, here is what monitoring costs against the make-ready spend it checks. Your build will differ.
Modeled from the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute's published BEAD pole parameters at their base case. Not PoleProof client results. And the first check is free, so finding out costs nothing.
Project Monitoring watches both moments a pole owner can overcharge you, the estimate and the invoice, automatically, so nothing slips past on either side of the bill. It is priced per active build project rather than per company, so the cost sits with the project it belongs to.
Every estimate is checked against your agreement and the applicable cost-allocation rules before a dollar leaves your account. The strongest save is the overcharge that never happens.
Every final invoice and true-up is audited automatically, and anything off becomes a Findings Report showing the line, the rule or benchmark it rests on, and the corrected amount.
Start with zero risk: your first month of monitoring is credited against the first fee earned, so getting started costs you nothing out of pocket.
A single build, up to 500 poles submitted for make-ready.
A full build at BEAD or RDOF scale, 501 to 2,000 poles submitted.
A large program, 2,001 to 5,000 poles submitted. A build larger than that runs as several projects, each on its own plan.
Not sure which plan fits your build? It comes down to one question.
See how the plans work →Priced per active build project, on poles submitted for make-ready rather than poles in your footprint, because a pole nobody touches costs nobody anything. A 12-month initial term, then month to month, with no automatic renewal into another fixed term. A fixed-fee arrangement with no success component is available on request, and is offered by default to public agencies and cooperatives whose procurement rules make a percentage awkward. Over twelve months the three named plans come to $4,740, $9,540 and $14,340, all below the $15,000 federal micro-purchase threshold set in October 2025; a single project carrying the per-pole increment above 5,000 crosses it above roughly 5,900 submitted poles. Your own entity sets its own threshold, so confirm yours. Founding-client pricing while we bring on our first monitored builds. No calls and no meetings, and you can elect month to month from the start. How the plans work, and which one to choose.
We come from the building side of fiber, and we kept seeing the same thing on job after job. The pole owner writes the make-ready estimate, does the work, sends the invoice, and signs off on its own numbers. The numbers ran high, sometimes well past what the rules allow, and nobody on the build had time to fight every line.
So we built the check we always wanted on that side of the table. Every finding points to a source you can see for yourself: the clause in your agreement, the rule that actually governs that pole, whether that is FCC Part 1 Subpart J or your state's own regime for a co-op's or a city's poles, or what comparable builders in your region actually pay. We don't assert anything without a citation.
You risk nothing to look. Find nothing, owe nothing. Find something, and you keep the larger share.
The PoleProof team
No calls, no meetings. Create an account, upload one estimate or invoice, and your first check is free. Already holding a document? Upload it and we open your audit straight away.
Business use only. Use your company email so we can verify your domain.
Your audits, recovered totals, and dispute deadlines, all in one place.
Nothing here asks you to take a number on trust. Every figure opens to the line item and the rule it rests on.
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Plain-language explainers on what actually governs a pole charge, and how PoleProof checks it. A few to start with, or see the full library.
The federal rules, the 2026 timelines, and self-help.
DA 26-579, and what could change for your build.
Why overcharges hit a fixed grant hardest.
Seven signs a bill is padded, and what you actually owe.
Regulatory changes, rate rulings, and anything worth knowing if you deal with pole invoices. Not sales emails. Email us and we will add you.